by Peter Straub
“Better get your ass in gear,” Billy said.
Someone was shouting downstairs.
Richard went to the door and punched in the button on the knob.
“Kinda lost his cool when he saw that dent in the fender.” Billy was still grinning at him, still rubbing Laura’s rump.
BEDROOM DOOR RATTLES.
The door noisily shook against the lock. The person on the other side knocked once, then twice more. “Spunky? Hey, Spunky? Let me in, will you?” It was Carter Oldfield’s expressive voice, but the voice sounded ragged and out of breath. “I paid for this house, I own it. Let me in, you little creep.” The voice also sounded drunk—Richard had heard that dragging slur before.
“Go away,” he said. And Billy Bentley chuckled from the bed.
“Don’t tell me to go away,” roared Carter Oldfield. “I’ve got some business to take care of with you.”
The ax began to strike the door with great thudding splintering blows.
Richard shuddered into wakefulness, his heart thundering in his chest. The digital clock on the bedside table read 4:04. Laura whiffled in her sleep, disturbed by the sloshing Richard had created when he had awakened. Striped wallpaper he would never have chosen shone for a moment on the walls, picked out by the glowing scoops of a passing car’s headlights.
3
On Monday morning the Allbees met the real-estate person, Ronnie Riggley, at her office at one of the shopping centers on the Post Road. Ronnie was a big brash transplanted Californian with an eager laugh and short shining platinum hair. She had the physical grace and confidence that follows some former athletes throughout their lives, and Richard supposed that she had been a good high-school swimmer or diver back in Marin County. When the Allbees had arrived the previous spring to look at rentals, two innocent know-nothings, Ronnie had taken them in hand. Despite its flaws, the Fairytale Lane house had been the most suitable of all the houses they had seen that spring. Ronnie had treated them fairly, had even steered them away from rentals less suitable and more expensive. They liked her: she made the wearying business of house-hunting more enjoyable than it would have been otherwise.
“Let’s hit the trail.” Ronnie held up a sheaf of listings. “We’ll look at three this morning, have a nice lunch somewhere, and then hit two more this afternoon. I want you to get an idea of what’s available in your price range.”
They got into her car, a blue Datsun with RONNI license plates. “I hope you’re sleeping all right,” she said. “It can be hard, in an unfamiliar place.”
“Not really,” Laura said from the backseat. “The bed sloshes.”
Ronnie whooped with laughter. “Oh, darn, I forgot—that house has a water bed! But don’t you think you’ll get used to it?”
“I’d rather not get used to it,” Richard said. “Surfing is surfing and sleeping is sleeping, and never the twain shall meet.”
He picked up the first of the listing sheets between himself and Ronnie. “Is this where we’re going first?”
Ronnie nodded. “Say, I feel a little tacky, asking this, but I just have to do it. Could you . . . I mean, would you mind saying it for me? You know what I mean.”
She wanted him to say the line. He glanced at Laura, who was grinning wickedly at him from the backseat.
“Or do you just hate it when people ask you to do that?”
“Nobody’s asked me to say it in ten years at least. Okay. ‘Hey, Mom, I want a whole plate of cookies!’”
Both women laughed.
“Well, my voice changed.”
Laura said, “That wasn’t so bad, was it, dear?”
“Not so bad? It was wonderful,” Ronnie said. “I just had to ask—I can’t believe that was you. I told my boyfriend—you know, Bobo, the guy who’s a cop?—I was showing you houses, and Bobo said, ask him to say it. Sometimes when Bobo’s on eight-to-twelve we watch your program after he gets back. It’s on nearly every night, you know. I think it’s just so neat that you’re moving back to Hampstead.”
“Of course, we hardly knew it,” Richard said. “Both of us were practically babies when we left.”
“Oh, you’ll love it here—there’s always something going on. When we had our big office party for our customers last Christmas, Jane Frobisher, she works with me, came up to some people I just sold a house to and she said, ‘You just moved into Hampstead? You’re so young to get divorced!’
“Oh, my gosh, listen, do you know about the murder yet?” Ronnie broke into their laughter. “Bobo told me about it. It happened Saturday night, and after Bobo got back to the station after that big accident on the thruway, everybody was talking about it. I hate to talk about the wages of sin and all that, but I guess the lady got turned into lamb patties by her Mr. Goodbar while her husband was out working.”
That was how the Allbees first heard of Stony Friedgood.
“Madame Bovary in Patchin County,” Laura said.
“So there’s another house for sale in Hampstead,” Richard said.
“Oh, it’s not for you,” Ronnie said quickly. “I know that house. It’s strictly IBM. I Been Moved.”
4
If, during lunch at the same French restaurant Clark and Jean Smithfield had liked, Ronnie Riggley went into perhaps too much detail about the circumstances of Stony Friedgood’s death; if these circumstances suddenly reminded Richard Allbee of his nightmare about a crazed Carter Oldfield battering at a bedroom door with an ax; if none of the houses they had seen were right—the affordable ones needed so much work Richard would have had to neglect his clients—and if even three houses tended to blur into each other after an ice-cold martini and a glass of the excellent house white, still the three of them began to experience the glow of a beginning friendship. Richard even told a few well-worn anecdotes about Carter Oldfield’s tantrums on the set of Daddy’s Here. Laura lovingly described the Kensington house (which gave Ronnie some very specific ideas about what to show the Allbees). Ronnie gave them hope that life in Patchin County could be satisfying, interesting, and fun too: sitting across from them with her smile, her swimmer’s shoulders and shining helmet of hair, she was a signpost toward a future where the things that shadowed them could be weightless. She even offered the hope of an infant social life by saying that they should all go out to dinner with Bobo some night during the next week. “Then you’ll really get the lowdown on Hampstead,” Ronnie said. “Bobo knows it all. And he’s a great guy besides. Well, I would think so, I’m only in love with him.”
And she gave Laura the name of a good doctor. “Everybody uses Dr. Van Horne,” she said. “He’s the best gynie man in town. He’s extremely sensitive, which you’d think was pretty special if you had gone to some of the turkeys I trusted with my life before I switched to him. He’ll treat you like a queen and recommend a good O.B. person too.”
She smiled at Laura. “Lump. I think that’s so cute. Lump Allbee, the healthiest kid in Stride-Rites.”
Laura pulled a notebook from her bag and wrote down: Dr. Wren Van Horne, Gyn.
3
Graham
1
Instinct tells me that now is the time to emerge from the cover of the godlike narrator who knows what all his characters are thinking and doing at all times and who takes an impartial stance toward them. Already this pose has slipped, never more so than when I alluded to myself. This is me, Graham Williams, writing this account. Call me Graham. No, you damn well better not. Call me Mr. Williams, unless you happen to be within at least a decade of my age, which is seventy-six. I have outlived every doctor who had warned me that I was smoking and drinking myself into a premature grave, and I am a cranky old party. My views are fixed and my bowels are still good. I have twelve of my original teeth, which is pretty fair going, and a lot of expensive bridgework. I wrote thirteen novels, only three of them crappy, a selfconsciously harrowing memoir of my years on the booze, and seven screenplays. At least one of these still sounds pretty perky when the movie shows up on the tube. This w
as Glenda, which starred Mary Astor as and Gary Cooper and James Cagney as lover and husband of. I am a failure and a coward. As a young man I learned to undermine my enemies by knocking myself before anybody else got the chance.
Of course these days I don’t have any enemies left to speak of, which is a damn shame. All those battles turn into ancient history when your foes die off. Nobody cares about them anymore, and when you talk to a bunch of kids about the time you went head to head with some crass knucklebrained demigod of a studio boss, their eyes turn to stone. You might as well be talking about cave men and saber-toothed tigers. Even that sweaty weasel who bitched my life, the junior senator from Wisconsin, tail-gunner Joe, died a long time ago, and so did most of his fellow weasels on HUAC. Sterling Hayden—there’s a man. Him I could talk to.
The reason for coming out of cover and talking directly like this is that I lived through everything that happened in the lower end of Patchin County, and the book I was writing turned into this one. What I didn’t know about, I had to make up, but it all could have happened, and maybe did, just the way I wrote it. I kept my eyes open, and I saw plenty. At the end of it Richard Allbee said to me, “Why don’t you sit down and tell the whole story?” And that’s how this book will end, if you’re one of those folks who has to turn to the last page to see how it all comes out. My friends let me read their diaries, and that’s where a lot of this stuff comes from.
2
But a lot comes from what I saw and heard, as I said. Consider where I lived. My house was on Beach Trail in Greenbank, right across the street from the old Sayre house, which the Allbees finally bought. “Four Hearths,” where Tabby went with his father and stepmother, is just two minutes up the hill. Patsy and Les McCloud lived catty-corner across from my backyard. Mount Avenue, the Golden Mile, runs up toward Hillhaven just down the end of Beach Trail—I knew Monty Smithfield, not well, and I met Stony Friedgood when she was in that book group, High Minds. (If I stood on my roof, I could chunk a rock right through the window of the bedroom where they found Stony, at least I could have twenty years ago.) High Minds was talking about one of my books that week, Twisted Hearts, and Stony asked me if the husband in the novel understood that he was forcing his wife into the affair with my hero. “Forcing her?” I asked. “They finally got a new paperback deal for Twisted Hearts because some editor thought it was a feminist statement.” “From the neck down, no,” Ms. Friedgood replied.
Gary Starbuck, the professional thief who played a minor role in some of our lives and who will appear in these pages soon, rented the roomy old Frazier Peters house only two blocks away, and after his death I walked through the astonishing display of stolen silver, television sets, paintings, and furniture with most of my neighbors before Bobo Farnsworth and the other cops sealed the place. And I knew that rascal Pat Dobbin, because I had seen him grow up: his father was a friend of mine in the boozing days I wrote about in Lost Time. I rescued myself, Dan Dobbin didn’t, but he was a better illustrator than his son.
But more important than all of that—or as important anyhow—I couldn’t look at Mount Avenue without seeing the Jaegers running down it with their torches in 1779, I couldn’t look at Monty Smithfield’s big house without seeing the wooden shack enigmatic Gideon Winter had put up on that spot in 1645. I knew the area, my father knew it, and my great-great-grandfather too. When I looked at some happy kid named Moorman or Green, some kid in jeans and braces, I saw in him the leathery old onion farmer or blacksmith who’d had the same name and had given him a sixteenth of his genes.
3
One thing is more important than my eccentric knowledge of the genetic makeup of fifth-graders whose names were on the oldest tombstones in Gravesend Cemetery. I was one of the first to see the immediate effects of what I called the thinking cloud after it settled down over us. Of course I made no more sense of it than anyone else at the time, having no idea that there was sense to be made.
4
Effects, I said. Two effects. I encountered the first of these, the second ten minutes later, while I was taking a walk down Beach Trail on Sunday morning, the eighteenth of May. On most sunny mornings I limp down the street to Mount Avenue, turn right and walk past the gates of the Academy and turn into the short public road to Gravesend Beach. I look at the water and the people moving up and down on the beach. I breathe in the salt air, which has kept me alive all this time. No salt on your food, lots of good salt air in your lungs. If I see them, I generally say hello to Harry and Babe Zimmer, who materialize in their beat-up old Ford pickup around eight or nine to fish off the breakwater. Harry and Babe are a couple of kids in their mid-sixties. They look like old jack o’lanterns left outside since last Halloween. Harry and Babe call me Mr. Williams. Then I crawl back. The whole exercise should take about ten minutes, but it takes me over half an hour.
That morning I never got as far as the beach. There had been a small interruption in the epic wander while I inspected the latest damage to my mailbox, several heavy bangs and dents I took as a homicide attempt. The mailbox killer had apparently switched from cherry bombs to blunt instruments. After the inspection, I resumed the death-defying journey.
I was just toiling past the immaculate lawn of the last house on my side of Beach Trail when I saw a body on the grass. The immaculate lawn was Bobby Fritz’s work (Bobby knew every blade, every tree, every flower surrounding these houses, except for the poor stuff on my lawn), the body was Charlie Antolini’s. Charlie appeared to be deader than my mailbox, and I scuttled up on the lawn to get a closer look.
Charlie was a toughie, about forty, the son of the family that owned the Lobster House and a couple of other restaurants in Patchin and Westchester counties. As a kid he had been a hustler—at nine or ten, back in the days before mailbox assassinations, he was my newsboy. Even then he was a nuts-and-bolts human being, jittery with the need to make more money, money, money. He had finally accumulated enough to put himself and his family into the big green clapboard on Mount Avenue. The wrong side, not the Sound side, but still Mount Avenue.
“Need any help, Charlie?” I asked. I had seen right away that he was not dead. He was very still, but his green eyes were open and he was smiling a little. This was not a typical Charlie Antolini smile. It was positively blissful. He was wearing pale blue silk pajamas. “Liable to get a nasty burn, Charlie,” I said.
“Hi there, Mr. Williams,” he said.
Charlie had not addressed me by name since about 1955. I thought he figured that a grubby old scribbler like me sort of lowered the tone of the neighborhood. “You sure you’re all right?” I asked.
“Just fine, Mr. Williams,” he said, giving me that smile his mother wouldn’t recognize.
“Felt like taking the air, hey? It’s a good idea, Charlie. Keeps the tubes clear. Why don’t you come down to the beach with me, say hello to Harry and Babe?”
“Got up this morning and felt great,” he said. “Just unfucking-believable. Got outside. Felt even better. Felt too good to go to work.”
“It’s Sunday, Charlie,” I said. “Nobody goes to work on Sunday.” Then I remembered that he was probably due at the Lobster House to help out with the brunch crowd.
“Sunday,” he said. “Oh, yeah.”
I looked up at his house. His wife was semaphoring from the living-room window. “I think you ought to get off the lawn, Charlie,” I said. “Florence looks pretty upset.” Then I spotted his mailbox, formerly one of the apples of Charlie’s eye. Metal like mine, but twice as large, it was painted the same shade of green as his house. Over the green Charlie’d had someone paint a pattern of flowers and vines trailing through a big red ANTOLINI. Now this contraption lay on the driveway, knocked right off its pole. The side was bashed in, and shiny aluminum shone through the paint. I said, “Say, the gang that killed my box got yours too. Yours is more of a case of outright decapitation.”
“Just feel that sun,” Charlie said.
Flo Antolini was waggling her arms behind the window
, either telling me to clear off or to pick Charlie up and carry him inside. The latter was out of the question. Charlie must have weighed about two-forty. Under the blue silk and the flab, he still looked like the halfback he’d been on the J. S. Mill High School football team in 1959. I couldn’t have lifted one of his legs. I shrugged to Flo, put my hands in my pockets, said, “Well, enjoy yourself” to Charlie and prepared to maneuver myself back onto the sidewalk.
I had just accomplished this when I heard a woman screaming Charlie’s name. “Mr. Antolini! Mr. Antolini!”
“Better hustle inside, Charlie,” I said, figuring that one of the neighbor ladies had taken offense at the sight of him beached out there on his beautiful lawn. This was Hampstead, after all, not Dogpatch.
Then I saw the woman from across the street barreling toward us. Evelyn Hughardt, Mrs. Dr. Hughardt. She was wearing a pink housecoat and had pink fuzzy things on her feet. She looked terrible.
“Mr. Antolini, please,” she yelled, and ran across the street without bothering to look both ways. When she got closer I saw how terrible she really looked. Normally she was a nice looking blond lady, almost as big and healthy as that real estate woman, Ronnie Riggley. Plenty of tennis keeps them that way.
She damn near knocked me over and knelt down on the grass beside Charlie. She grabbed one of his hands and tried to yank him sideways. “It’s Dr. Hughardt, my husband,” she said. “Oh, please. I don’t know what to do, and he’d be so ashamed of me . . .”
“Hi there, Evvy,” Charlie said, giving her that beautiful green-eyed smile.
“Come on, please, Mr. Antolini, please please help me.”